March 19, 2006
the years of magical thinking
Francis Fukuyama's recent change of heart is farce and tragedy at once. Fukuyama, the neocon and neo-neo-Hegelian, proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man, with an inverted millennarism, that the long progress of historical spirit had found its final form — that U.S.-style liberal capitalism had superseded everything else. He then (somewhat oxymoronically) helped inscribe the strategic and ideological dogma for maintaining the supposedly steady state, in the famed "Project for the New American Century" documents. In the race to war, he served as a marshal.
But now, in the words of Tom Petty, there's been a change. The blinders are off! He is against the war! History may not be over quite yet! This change is recorded in numerous places, not the least of which is the seven-page abstract of new volume America at the Crossroads, featured in the paper of record's weekend fashion spread a few Sundays back (and archived for free here). A couple weeks later, reviewing the book itself, the POR opens by focusing its amazement on the book's apostasy...made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself.
Apostasy must be secured, natch, through the ritual denunciation of the apostate by a true believer — a labor taken up by Chris Hitchens, the neocons' potbellied attack pig, in the pages of Slate. That ought to do it; Fukuyama can now be a hero, or at least a name to proffer, for the progressive liberals who dream only of being allowed to say "I told you so" once in a midterm election.
Alas, Fukuyama's blinders aren't off so much as optimized. He is still searching for a successful strategy for American hegemony; he's just come to realize that a somewhat higher competence level may be required. A world in which this brings comfort to anyone of conscience is tragic to say the least. Meanwhile, his profound aspect-blindness is unchanged. One clear indication is in the piece Fukuyama wrote recently for Slate, in which he diagnoses last year's French riots as part of
....the ongoing struggle with radical Islamism (aka the "war on terrorism").
This is a smallish detail in the essay, but an utterly telling one. Perhaps he failed to read any of the serious journalistic coverage of the riots; perhaps he has no French friends, or, just as likely, his informants share his blindness. We have a name for that: ideology. Dude (as I like to say to destroy my own credibility), that wasn't radical Islam. That wasn't terrorism. That was poor, mostly immigrant kids. That was class conflict.
What the rioters had in common was, in ascending order of commonality, a) varying tones of darker-colored-than-Sarkozy skin, b) a history of being actively and passively brutalized by governmental agents, most notably cops with batons, tasers, and guns, and c) disenfranchisement.
To not see this is to see nothing. One wonders if Mr. Fukuyama is able to present the current unrest by poor and disenfranchised French youth as similarly linked to "radical Islamism," or if, in what may be an even greater achievement in magical thinking, he finds this wave to be unrelated and only coincidentally similar. Unable to see, much less speak, the obvious, these are his choices — and ours. Which is to say that, as an intelligent and informed person with the apparent capacity to open and change his mind, Fukuyama is the America we would like to believe in. But with his hysterical inability to mention social relations, social class, and the transnational, transreligious confrontation between the wealthy and the disenfranchised, Fukuyama is the America we know, in which any story can be told as long as it doesn't mention those niceties. In that regard, Fukuyama clings to to the murderous blindness of the New American Century as dogmatically any of his colleagues, while playing at debate — a farce indeed.
Posted by jane at March 19, 2006 06:18 AM | TrackBack